Comments on Sartrean Existentialism: Individuals and Society, Freedom and Ethics
That amorphous quasi-movement which has been significant in philosophy and literature since its post-war inception, that of the “existentialists,” has no definable founder or beginning (let alone end), but takes its most familiar (French, atheistic, individualist) form in the early work of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Having studied it somewhat in recent months, I wish to codify some comments. Specifically, Sartre’s thoughts laying the foundations for classical existentialism, as associated with him (as well as with de Beauvoir and with Camus and his “absurdism”), were primarily communicated in his lecture/essay Existentialism is a Humanism and subsequently in commentaries and elucidations thereof, by him and by others. Other notable works of his, like Being and Nothingness (his work on “phenomenological ontology,” which is enormous) and Critique of Dialectical Logic (his effort to reconcile existentialism with a highly unorthodox “Marxism;” as I understand it it was generally poorly received by Marxists and existentialists alike), are not mine to comment on; I have not read them*. I am interested, here, principally only in Existentialism.
ON FREEDOM AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Sartre’s conception of the existentialist project, a project of individualist philosophy concerned (in the manner of phenomenology, from whence it flowed) with the individual subject’s experience of their existence, of its purpose, of its essence, is founded upon a particular fixation on the notion of freedom. Sartre declares that people are “condemned to be free,” totally utterly free: because there is no God, humans are not made with a pre-ordained purpose or function, and thus human individuals are absolutely free to define the “meaning” and significance of their own existence through their own actions. Persons are not intrinsically good or bad, but make themselves one or the other and indeed define what the two even mean by their actions after already coming into being as individuals. All of this is expressed in the pithy little maxim “Existence precedes Essence,” meaning that one defines one’s purpose and values in life only after they have come into being, and these things are not intrinsic- this is one of the main theses of Existentialism is a Humanism.
Marxism proper agrees, of course, that persons do not have a metaphysical significance and moral character imposed on us by Yahweh-Jehovah-Allah-Brahman-AhuraMazda-etc. But we must dissent with the profoundly individualist thesis that each individual is utterly free to decide on their own essence, is “condemned to be free,” regardless of the circumstances or context they find themself in. The only way this thesis can be accepted, it seems to me, is by a profound stretching of what is thought of as freedom, a stretching wide enough to render it meaningless. If a person may choose between only destitution and unemployment and death by starvation without a source of income, or employment in a miserable job that doesn’t pay enough to cover the insurance needed to cover the injuries it incurs and thus slow death by wear, does this person have freedom? Sartre would say that they do, that whatever their circumstances they remain totally free in deciding how to act within those circumstances. This is, it seems to me, such a broad sense of “freedom” that it is devoid of use-value as an idea. I do not believe one can be said to be “free” in the possible decisions available for one to make unless at least one of these decision-pathways offers a viable path toward happiness and fulfillment in life. Of course, many many people find themselves regularly in positions where, whatever limited decisions they may be able to make, there are no available options that bring them fulfillment or happiness- these people are not free. So while Sartre is correct in declaring the essence of a person’s life to be constructed within society, he is wrong to describe this as something they themselves are totally free to do as an absolute individual.
Indeed, we must understand it as something that is fundamentally and inextricably connected to the circumstances of political economy, socio-cultural superstructure, and other historical context in which a person exists. Marx wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” This functions in the right context as the Marxist retort in brief to Sartrean existentialist notions on the essence of human lives. A person born in, let us say, a pre-colonial Igbo village, a kind of slave society, whatever choices he makes, will never be the same as a person born in feudal China or in a primitive-communal tribe, for even the choices they make are products of the historical phase of society in which they exist. Their vision of themself is a vision of themself in relation to the economic system and social order of their society, either together with the rule of its ruling class or in contradiction against it. The essence of a person’s life can never be separated from the social circumstances in which they live, and is made not by them alone but by them in concert with the overarching economic mode and social order of their society, the superstructural cultural systems thereof, and the persons with whom they interact in this context. A person is not an artwork made by themself, but the collaborative artwork of an entire place-time moment in the history of human society and of every other person existing therein as well as themself.
A longstanding and correct notion in Marxism’s anthropological areas of philosophical inquiry is that so-called “human nature,” the sum of supposedly immutable and essential characteristics that indelibly define human persons, is actually very mutable in that it is a product of particular social systems and as those systems change it does as well. The exemplar of this area of discussion is Engels’s work in On the Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State to demonstrate that apparently timeless and unquestionable systems of consanguinity (and related systems of property control) are in fact distinct products of particular historical moments, and that different historical moments have likewise had different systems thereof. This idea continues to be validated by archaeology and research, and we may apply it also to refuting Sartrean existentialism: the essence of a person is made not just by them, but by them in subordination to their historical and social context.
The science and philosophy of materialist dialectics (the field of study), the study and comprehension of reality as a matter of dialectical relationships (or just “dialectics” (the phenomena described by the field and understood through it objectively as being dialectical)), shows us that every entity in the universe both consists of contradicting parts in unity-and-opposition, and exists in unity-and-opposition with other, contradicting entities as components of larger things. In other words, all things are shaped and made by the interactions between their parts and by their interactions with other entities in contradiction, in struggle and change; no entity is purely discrete, but all are interconnected and mutually modify one another as contradictions emerge and are resolved by struggle between them, creating new entities and new phases of dialectical struggle. If this is clearly understood, then it is obvious how absurd it is to suggest any individual is totally discrete and sovereign in the decisions they make. A person is always a sum of their own different contradicting parts, and always part of the greater whole of all their relationships; they are never a sovereign and discrete entity that makes decisions without input from the rest of society and the universe.
Also, it is in general my view that philosophy at large in the present bourgeois society has entirely overemphasized the individual and taught itself an exaggerated notion of how independent the individual is- this is the result of the influence of early liberalism, which exaggerated the importance of individual independence because the preceding ideology of the feudal epoch had so underemphasized it, and it has resulted in the individualism of Sartrean existentialism, among other traditions. In actual fact, I charge, the appearance of antagonism in the individual↔society contradiction arises only from mistaken philosophical and political perspectives; when it is viewed properly, it is clear that it can be benign, and can be easily resolved or at least made benign in communist society, or the social effort toward it.
There is an analogy by which I have always best understood my own view of the individual↔society contradiction, which I conceived of independently, only to later find it had been previously and more clearly conceived of by the left-wing (largely anarchist-influenced) American novelist Ursula K. LeGuin, as a component of the fictional ideology of Odonianism in her novel The Dispossessed. The analogy goes that the sum of human society is a body, and every individual a cell. Obviously, no cell can exist outside the body, and to the same degree the body cannot exist except by being the sum of its cells. Each cell is wonderful in many ways that should be appreciated, but many things only the whole body is truly capable of. And the health and harmony of the body depends on the correct handling of contradictions between the cells. The body may be unhealthy and abuse and sacrifice its own cells (as in an auto-immune disease, or a reactionary regime), or the individual cells may rebel against the body and do harm to other cells (as in cancer, or laissez-faire capitalism), but in the best of health every individual cell and the body collectively flourish alike, the freedom and happiness of each individual contributing to the greater happiness of the social whole. In this understanding, individualism is revealed as silly.
ON ETHICS
On ethics, Sartre’s departure from the Marxism to which he was a supposed sympathizer was greater. Sartre took issue with atheists who, while eschewing God himself, still believed in a universal ethics of a priori ideals which- according to Sartre- could not actually make sense without the justification of it being God-given. On the basis of this he throws out any idea of objective and universal ethics, declaring that it is the right and the duty (and he views this duty as heavy burden, one we are again “condemned to be free” in regards to) of each individual to “choose the right” for themself in their actions, and to do so in a way that they believe is proper for themself and for all humanity. This, of course, is subjectivist, meaning it is thought that prioritizes one’s personal views and thoughts over the objective truths of a material or class-based outlook. Mao delineated two kinds of subjectivist thinking which could be ideologically dangerous in “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work,” and, although he was talking about approaches to political ideology, we may similarly apply the concepts to ethics. Sartre falls into the kind of subjectivism Mao deemed “empiricist”: Sartre prescribes that we only be concerned with what we ourselves perceive immediately before us. This is myopic. Even though he supposes that the personal ethical choices we make are made on behalf of all humanity, that we are (as Dostoevsky, also sometimes called an existentialist, said in The Brothers Karamazov) “all responsible to all for all,” this is nonetheless a short-sighted way of approaching ethics as it focuses on one’s immediate interpersonal interactions and ignores that these occur within the broader context of a political-economic system and its social order within class society, and that the class arrangements of these systems produce ethical viewpoints, those of classes, that far supersede personal opinion.
It is the basis of this, of taking a class viewpoint, that lays the foundation for the logic of the objective ethical framework we should take up: revolutionary proletarian utilitarianism. I have written on this in two previous short works, though it bears a longer and better analysis I may one day write☩. In any case, it may be said that, in a society where- as we have established- the relationships of individuals are defined and overshadowed by the class societies they occur within, it is myopic to pursue an ethics focusing only on subjective individual perceptions and eschewing efforts to objectively define the interests of classes within a contradictory set of social systems, and how they prompt individual action. We can better surmise how to generate correct ethical positions on the basis of dialectical materialist epistemology as outlined in Mao’s On Practice: our immediate subjective insight, our perceptual knowledge, is the fruit of our own personal material struggles, but perceptual knowledge must be refined through further struggle, in further material struggle in our minds and in discourse with our comrades, into objective rational knowledge, forming a theoretical paradigm we can then bring to bear on future experiences to better produce more perceptual knowledge. In this way our ethical paradigm should be formed: deriving knowledge from our subjective experience of struggle in the world, then refining it into and bringing to bear upon it an objective worldview based on the collective struggle of the proletariat. Sartre’s empiricism is right in some sense in that it says there is no a priori knowledge outside of material reality, but it is wrong to a greater extent in not understanding how knowledge that is generated in the material world is relevant to a greater reality than mere personal experience, and can know the true world in itself through dialectical interactions in/with that world, rather than merely the world of subjective experiences imagined by Sartre and Husserl’s phenomenology (for a defense of the key materialist thesis that the mind exists in/as a product of the material world and can truly know that world objectively as it is in-itself, see Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, esp. chapter 2.1 on “The Thing-In-Itself”; see Ilyenkov, Materialism is Militant and Therefore Dialectical).
SARTRE IN CONTEXT
We know from Mao that every idea is stamped with the interests of the class that has produced it, and we know in general that every idea must be considered in its context. What is the class context and general context of Sartre’s existentialism? And why does it matter in the context of the present, such that I choose to write in response?
Sartre was French. The France in which he came to philosophical maturity was, furthermore, a country ravaged by the past of two world wars, and grappling with upheaval within its colonial empire- e.g. the national liberation struggle in Algeria, in which France played the part of a monster. Sartre himself grew up into this environment from a background in which he had lost his father at a young age and had uneasy relations with his stepfather and grandfather. He was a man trying to find his own identity in contradiction with a childhood home life in which he had felt unwanted and displaced, and lived in a country trying to find its own identity in reckoning with the horrors it had witnessed and, importantly, wrought. In his class role he was a teacher and a writer- a labour-aristocrat or petit bourgeois, in the middle ground between the progressive and reactionary classes{1}. It may be said his work served sometimes the one and sometimes the other, but principally the reactionary bourgeois class.
His quest for identity and understanding is very typical of what one might stereotypically expect of a petit bourgeois: it tries to find escape from the wickedness in the social order of its time by asserting absolute individualism, asserting independence for the philosopher from the rest of society. Of course, this is naïve: how can the philosopher be truly sovereign, in the choices he makes, to define himself, when someone else has taught him the philosophy he uses to make those decisions?
Now, as to why I’ve bothered to write on Sartre. It has been my experience that, in many educational circles, the first introduction students are given to philosophy is to existentialism, and often that of Sartre. The overt reasons for this, at first appearances, make sense: it is concerned with questions (personal freedom, obligation to make decisions and try to be good) which are seemingly very relevant to young students seeking self-discovery, it is often written in approachable and conversational language, it has produced much literary fiction guided by its principles, et cetera. But there are covert functions, also, to the propagation of existentialism in the educational milieu of the cultural superstructure of bourgeois society.
Dialectical materialism teaches us we can know real reality, in the form of the material world, and that the collective masses of humanity interact with it in concrete, material ways. This is how knowledge, and ideology and philosophy in which knowledge can be contextualized, are developed by humanity, in its various socioeconomic classes, within the frame of political-economic material reality. But for existentialism, each person is perfectly alone in themself and their “totally free” choices, and not limited to their roles in social interactions and groups like classes, which are treated not as fundamental principles defining what each of us is as an individual, but as impositions to be shirked off by a deified individual, above class, above society, above historical context†. Further, each such individual for the existentialist knows the world only for what they subjectively experience it to be, in contrast to the necessary foundational axiom in that scientific materialism which is basal to all useful philosophy: that real people, through collective experience and struggle, can divine from subjective experiences an objective knowledge of the real, material world with which they interact- as expressed in Mao’s On Practice, in Lenin’s Materialism and EmpirioCriticism, in Marx’s Critique of the German Ideology, in Ilyenkov’s Materialism is Militant…, etc. In its subjectivism, existentialism presaged the postmodern fad- Nietzsche, the “great” progenitor of the postmodernists, is called an existentialist almost as often as he is a nihilist, though in my view he in fact was neither in the most strict sense.
It is hard not to see how existentialism, even in spite of how its great lion Sartre tried to be an anti-establishmentarian radical (and he did- he was acquainted with such persons as Guevara and Fanon, for instance, and wrote a preface for The Wretched of the Earth; he cheered on the revolutionaries of May 68 and was in fact arrested for his involvement, though De Gaulle then pardoned him; etc.•), feeds into the ideological machinery of bourgeois individualism. Sartre’s falling out with fellow-existentialist (or “absurdist,” his own brand of existentialism) Albert Camus concerned the contradiction between Camus’s tendency towards anarchism, and liberal views on art and literature, and Sartre’s own increasing (critical) support for socialism in the authentic sovietist form (which he saw as a progressive social force despite significant disagreement with genuine Marxist ideology), in the context of French and global politics in the early cold war{2}•. Yet it has been Camus’s individualist viewpoint that has won out as the dominant interpretation of existentialism, and indeed the essence of it was in Sartre’s ideological writings and teachings as well, even if he denied it•. For in reality both readings of existentialism were wrong ideologies, in antagonistic contradiction against the truths of Marxist materialism, and indeed the communists in France at this time- even as he begrudgingly supported them- were never much enamored with Sartre{2}, and indeed he responds to their critiques in Existentialism is a Humanism.
It cannot be called simple coincidence that the first exposure of many high school and university students in the US to formal philosophizing is carried out in the company of the existentialists. This predisposes them to radical (or I ought to say “radical”) individualism, to rejection of any kind of group identity and to wallowing in their own subjective perceptions and the pursuit of singularly individualistic ends. Of course extreme group identity can be a reactionary quality- we want to discourage people away from the kind of extreme group identity that produces such things as racial or gender chauvinism, obviously. And of course there is nothing wrong with understanding oneself as an individual, within reason- as I have said above, in my conception of a non-antagonistic resolution of the individual↔society contradiction understood through a cell-body metaphor, believing in the value of the group and of the individual is perfectly sensible, even as a body can only exist as a sum of cells and each bodily cell can only exist in the context of its body. But to deny any meaning to group identity is to stand firmly in the way of social progress, which comes only by the struggle of great masses of people- the class struggle. The existence of people within society, the only way in which we can exist, forces persons to be parts of social collectives, and, as Marx writes in Critique of the German Ideology’s first chapter, class society forces individual persons with common interests and relations to production to manifest in their interactions with society and the world, the material dialectical processes which drive human history, as distinct classes. Teaching people not to understand themselves as anything other than perfectly free, perfectly singular individuals teaches them cutthroat-ness and anti-solidarity: it teaches them not to work with others in similar positions toward common needs and resolutions of common problems, it teaches them to seek their own interests at the expense of all others. Arch-individualism primes individuals to be stockbrokers, opportunists, and parasites. It must be forcibly combated, beginning in the educational system- and we must, as communists, always be ardent critics of the educational system of the bourgeois state, which indoctrinates youths into the superstructural ideology and culture of its bourgeois social order- with a demand for philosophy to be concerned seriously with the material concerns of social classes, not simply with the abstract fancies of deified individuals.
We must take up philosophical inquiry as a concrete weapon for use in informing struggle, through its ability to refine the perceptual, fundamental knowledge acquired in material struggle into new advancements of rational theoretical guiding thought that can guide further struggle, deriving further knowledge. The philosopher must be allied with the struggle of the working class to wrest collective control over their labour-power and its produced surplus value away from the individual parasites of the bourgeois class, with the struggle of the colonized countries of the world to thrust off the rule of foreign finance capital and its bureaucrat bourgeois and semifeudal lackeys through New Democratic revolution on the road to socialism, and with the struggle of the People of the world, led by the proletariat, to resolve all the contradictions of the capitalist system through the establishment of the socialist economic system and the social order of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat by revolution in every country. Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the universal contributions of Gonzalo Thought, and other revolutionary guiding thoughts, our ideological basis for philosophizing and understanding reality. Long live philosophy as a weapon for the good of humanity and the downtrodden toiling masses!
SOURCES (ones not cited in main body of text)
- I source my biography of Sartre from that in Basic Writings of Existentialism, compiled by Gordon Marino; this also includes Existentialism is a Humanism.
- Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, David A. Sprintzen, chapter “Camus and Sartre: A Growing Estrangement.” This work is liberalistic and not to be taken at face value- among other things, it rails against “Stalinism” and takes the “revelations” of Khrushchev’s slander against Stalin at face value. The work also includes some writings of its subject matter, including Camus’s angry response to a negative review of one of his books in Sartre and his lover De Beauvoir’s journal Modern Times, and Sartre’s re-response, in which he quite regretfully accuses his erstwhile friend of having become a counterrevolutionary in his eagerness to place himself and his work outside of the politically and historically relevant ideological debates of the day. There is a real sense of Camus’s anger, and Sartre’s sorrow, at the collapse of their friendship. Sartre sought to build up existentialist intellectualia as a community which fellow-traveled with the Marxists toward a free world, even as he questioned Marxist dialectical thinking as a science and an ideology; Camus wanted to build it up as an enlightened movement apart from the material concerns of the day, attached to a “third way” (neither capitalist nor sovietist) “left”- anarchistic in form, liberalistic in essence.
FOOTNOTES
*Since the drafting of this article I have read two chapters of Being and Nothingness, the two included in the same anthology of existentialist writings which I cited for its biography of Sartre. They feature some interesting material on the enigma of the human person’s consciousness-self; I don’t consider them relevant to what I am trying to say here. I still haven’t, and probably won’t, read Critique of Dialectical Logic.
☩This would trace the efforts to produce an objective scientific ethics from Jeremy Bentham, the bourgeois (though progressive in very many important respects) intellectual who originated utilitarianism as concerned with the principle of utility- the idea that acts are good or bad in so far as they are in service to the utility, the maximization of good/pleasure and minimization of bad/pain, of a given ethically considered party, be it all humanity or a group or an individual… to the idea of radically and qualitatively improving such consequentialist ethical theories with principled care for the specific, historically progressive interests of the majority working classes and their liberation as our ethically considered group- revolutionary proletarian utilitarian ethics, what I have called a class-utilitarianism of the proletariat, principally concerned with whether actions are good in the sense of whether they serve the interests and will of the progressive majority working class(es), with actions that do being ultimately for the good of developing all humanity toward communism and total freedom, which shall give to all humanity the freedom to pursue their own good/utility freely without the injustices native to class society. It would also be necessary to touch on what Badiou and others have said on ethics.
†I should note that there is a core difference between an individual imagining themself to be above class and a movement calling for the total abolition of class for all individuals. Of course, as communists, we stand absolutely in favor of the ultimate abolition of classes, to allow people and groups to define themselves beyond them. But this can only come through the struggle of the proletarian class all together to unite humanity within itself. For a single individual to suppose that they alone, under the current social order, can rise above class and define themselves in isolation, is bourgeois or petit-bourgeois ideology and in reality can only reinforce the class system.
•A fundamental contradiction in the thought and practice of Jean Paul Sartre and his camp of existentialists existed between his radical sympathies and his individualist ideals, just as the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society generally is that between the production of surplus value by the collective mass of one class and its theft/control over it by individuals of another (though its principal position is under imperialism taken from it by that between the imperialist and colonized countries). This contradiction, it seems, was resolved by the more “apolitical” or anarcho-liberal existentialism of Camus taking the chief role in the interpretation of existentialism by academia, and thus the individualist aspect dominating- but this only brought existentialism as a whole into sharper contradiction with Marxism.
